The present invention relates to processing of received information performed in a communication apparatus provided in a communication path between client terminals and server terminals.
The Internet is utilized to access from a client terminal to a server terminal, so that various services are becoming available. However, when client terminals request services to server terminals directly, the requests from the client terminals are concentrated in a specific server terminal, so that the capacity of communication lines or processing capability of the server terminal that processes the requests is not enough to cope with the requests and it takes a considerable time for the client terminals to receive and enjoy the services. As a countermeasure against this problem, there is a communication method using a proxy apparatus.
The communication method between server terminals and client terminals through the proxy apparatus is described in article 1: “Hypertext Transport Protocol HTTP/1.1”, by Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., and Berners-Lee, T., RFC 2068, UC Irvine, Digital Equipment Corporation, M.I.T., pp. 11–13, January, 1997.
Recently, the communication proxy apparatus is further requested to have function that can set up thoughtful service contents in accordance with user's attributes and function that can manage user's information such as user's accounting information.
The technique having the purpose of adding the function to the communication proxy apparatus is described in article 2: International Publication No. WO-A1-00046679, for example.
The article 2 discloses that character-string information described by a tag-type language is added to data to be transmitted and received between the communication proxy apparatuses and the communication proxy apparatuses are controlled in accordance with kind of the character-string information. Further, processing utilizing the character-string information to be transmitted to the communication proxy apparatus from a client terminal is not performed.
In other words, in the technique disclosed in the article 2, there is room for improvement in the respect that the communication proxy apparatus effectively utilizes various kinds of information possessed by the server-side terminal and the client-side terminal.
Further, in order to cope with modification of various kinds of character-string information transmitted from the server-side terminal and the client-side terminal, although it is necessary to efficiently set up a processing unit that performs processing in accordance with character-string information to be transmitted in the communication proxy apparatus, the article 2 does not disclose the setting-up method in detail.
Accordingly, the communication proxy apparatus further improved is desired.